Cloud Gaming: Design Architecture and Challenges

System Architecture

We can see that a player's control moves must be sent over the Internet from its thin client to the cloud gaming platform i.e to the pseudo player on cloud, so once the command or the control reaches the cloud gaming platform they are transformed into appropriate game actions and moves of multi players, which are then understood and executed according to the game logic resulting into changes in the game world. The changes perceived in the game world are then processed by the cloud system's graphical processing unit (GPU) into a combined scene. The interrelated combined scenes must be compressed by the video encoder, and then sent to a video streaming module, which delivers the video stream back to the thin client. Finally, the thin client decodes the video and displays the video frames in specified sequence to the player. The player on receiving this scene gets a feel of getting one to one correspondence with the gaming environment:

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  The Deployment Scenario of Cloud Gaming: A user first logs into the system via a portal server, which provides a list of available games to the user. The user then selects a preferred game and requests to play the game. On receiving the request, the portal server finds an available game server in the directory, it launches the selected game on the server, and returns the replica of game server’s URL to the user for connecting to the selected game. Finally, the user connects to the game server and starts to play. The portal server is just like most Web-based services and provides only a simple login application (Huang, 2013). Its user interface is also very simple and dynamic. If login and particular game selection requests are sent from a customized client, it does not even need a user interface for its implementation. Actions can be sent via different query messaging protocols.

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  The Architecture of the Game Server and the Game Client of Cloud Gaming: There are two different types of network flows in cloud based gaming architecture:

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    The dynamic data flow, and

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    The static control flow.